Architectural insight
After doing a coffee-table book Decoded Paradox that was a portrayal of his love for his hometown — Delhi, fashion designer JJ Valaya has again picked up the camera. “The Soul in the Space (A Journey of Architect-ural Influences)”, an ongoing exhibition at Gallery Nature Morte presents a series of photographs that are both abstract and personal. It features the designer’s love for architectural designs.
“These images have been inspired by the architecture of three cities that are very close to my heart. I have concentrated on mass, line and texture in both black-and-white and colour works, composing starkly dynamic scenarios that approximate a painterly aesthetic but also unmoor the subjects from their original contexts. Images range from large-scale blow-ups that communicate a monumental grandeur to sets of smaller prints that are grouped together, creating syncopated rhythms,” says Valaya, who has kept the palette purposefully reductive yet highly sumptuous, relishing the chromatic nuances to be discovered in stone, metal and concrete.
The focus of “The Soul in the Space” is on details of architecture shot in three locations that connect with Valaya’s own biography — Jodhpur (the city of his birth), Chandigarh (the city where he was raised), and Dufftown, Scotland (where he first discovered architectural photography during an artists’ residency). “Each city, in its own way, has contributed to honing my aesthetic — Jodhpur infused the omnipotent element of royalty that is seen in my fashion work. Chandigarh and especially Le Corbusier’s architecture cemented my fascination with concrete as a medium, an element I now keenly use in my interior projects; and finally, Dufftown (in Scotland) showed me how an industrial shed can speak a unique language of its own,” he says.
Valaya says that over the past several years, alongside a successful career in fashion, he has romanced and enjoyed himself tremendously in a parallel, secret existence in the company of a camera. “Photography for me started as a hobby, one that I have cherished and pursued with great enthusiasm for over two decades. To me, taking pictures was akin to a karmic connect, as it bestowed me almost with a celestial ability to show the world not only just as I wanted it to be seen, but also seize the moment to freeze time permanently,” he says.
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